He unstrapped and tried to get out of the hammock. An instant later he found himself floating at about the same level as the hammock, not touching the deck. A fragment of a dream about an elevator touched his mind and it suddenly occurred to him that he was falling—falling faster than he had fallen before. He closed his eyes, which promptly made it worse. He was falling—falling hundreds of miles to earth. An image formed in his mind of the ship entering the atmosphere, the screaming of the tortured air, the heating of the metallic shell from friction until it glowed a cherry red, roasting its occupant to a blackened cinder.
He screamed and the sound of his own voice brought him back to sanity. The sensation of falling was what he should expect from weightlessness. It was like being in the elevator he had imagined that kept going faster and faster until it fell away from beneath him. He kept his mind on the concept with an effort.
He managed to control his imagination but his nervous system kept sending the impulses which screamed that he was falling. He clutched at the hammock in a sudden wave of nausea. The feeling didn't leave him and he closed his eyes and vomited. It was amazingly easy to do—in free flight gravity no longer helped in holding down his meal.
He was in the middle of an agonizing attack of what any sailor would recognize as the "dry heaves" before he managed to gain control of his knotted stomach muscles.
The hammock served as a point of orientation and he dragged himself on to it and buried his face in the canvas. He tried not to feel anything or hear anything or think anything. He had lain like that for a long time when he felt something brush his face.
He opened his eyes and saw a few little spheroids of matter floating in the cabin. He batted idly at one with a free hand and it immediately broke up into smaller spheroids which drifted apart from each other.
He groaned. It had been a mistake to vomit. Whether he liked it or not, his next duty would have to be to gather up all the spheroids and stuff them into the disposal chute. He found a rubberized bag in the medicine kit and went after the spheroids much in the same way a little boy catches butterflies.
When he had finished the unpleasant task of collecting the spheroids, he glanced over at the chronometer. It read some fifty minutes since the beginning of the trip. Time to begin his tour of duty. He took the log book and made his round of the meters and jotted down their readings. Under Personal Reactions he jotted down sick; steady and unremitting feeling of nausea.
Ten minutes later he had accomplished his duties for the next eight-hour period. That left only—well, fourteen days going, same time returning. He had left only twenty-seven days and twenty-three hours before he'd see earth again.